Comrades through the Wilderness

Scripting on the Internet

I recently read the anti-web
manifesto, which I found
refreshing. If you haven't read it, go do so. If your too lazy to read
it, the gist is that we're trying to get the web to do too much (ie. run
applications, pixel-perfect layouts) and that quality browsers can't
exist, because what we use the web for these days is beyond the scope of
what the web was intended to do. The document is also refreshingly
snarky, in the long tradition of both hacker writing and the genre of
manifestos in general, but don't let that offend.

I've been known to say, "I hate the web," which is an ironic thing to
say given my line of work, but I think it's mostly true. To be fair, I
don't hate the web, I just hate what it's become: the only way to access
what happens on the Internet. It's great for publishing and accessing
content, but for applications? Somewhat less great.

The Manifesto centers on the notion that the perfect web-browser is
impossible to implement: Browsers have to implement inefficient
scripting languages, and multiple implementations of the various web
standards (because you have to implements both "how it should be done,"
and "how the old, broken implementations that everyone wrote pages to,
did it," with the end result being that browsers themselves suck. And
it's not a case of just writing the perfect browser because, current
expectations of the technology is flawed.

Separate information from empty multimedia content: use Flash for the
latter.

I'm not sure that I agree with this solution. I think HTML 5 will take
care of the multimedia content, and I think flash should be avoided. I
think scripting should be the first causality of the post-web Internet.
I don't see CSS as a problem, (the author sees it as a symptom of design
orientation in website creation), though I'd concede that it's used
improperly most of the time.

Given this, I think four bullet points from tycho regarding "The
'Post-Web' Web" are in order:

Eliminate JavaScript and all scripting in web-environments.
JavaScript is the table of the 'aughts and 'teens.

Develop/concentrate efforts on alternate (ie. non HTTP) protocols to
facilitate the movement of dynamic information across the Internet,
including well implemented clients.

Write a HTTP server that provides navigational meta-data
automatically with pages, and a browser with the ability to construct
site navigation based on this information. This way the architecture
of the site depends on the file layout and a configured file, but is
generated locally. Basically gopher, except designed in the casual
manner of the 'aughts.